 |
| Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > General Chat > Doc's 1/2/04 Sermon | Forum Quick Jump
|
 | 
Violin for God
Luke, I am your father. --Nooooooooo!!!!!
Date Joined Dec 2004
Total Posts : 690
|  Posted 1/9/2005 8:22 PM (GMT -6) |   |
MephEternal said...
You're really down with ALL the implications of his thought? Human beings supposed to have dominion over atmospheric phenomena?? Holding to the restorationist view of Creation? An original VEGETARIAN creation? Literal Adam and Eve? Venus fly traps and carnivores as demonically influenced?
Hey Meph,
If you perceive the world described in Genesis with what is typical for today, of course it would seem preposterous... but it's pretty clear that there was a *change*. You have to see it with eyes allowing for a "possible world" such as that of Genesis... otherwise of course it will seem absurd (gotta see it outside the box! )
about dominion over atmospheric phenomena, the disciples (in all likelihood) would have thought the same until they saw Jesus calm the storm. If Jesus did, couldn't God delegate the same control to man? Genesis seems to show that Adam and Eve (given that they really existed) were given dominion over the Earth, (but God still superceded them, of course).
about the restorationist view of Creation... the Earth was cursed because of Adam's sin. Jesus came to restore... first spiritually as we know, but it seems He'll come back to rule again, right? So with all the power God has, why would this be an impossibility?
about original vegetarian creation... Greg makes a good point about the fact that Genesis says "every green plant for food". If Genesis was fiction written by Moses or whatever other Jewish person, why would the writer who is obviously living in a culture where they eat meat include the words "green plant" (unless trying to forward some kind of vegetarianism agenda *yawn*)... if this were a myth, this kind of information wouldn't be there. This type of food allowance was given to "every beast of the Earth and every bird of the sky."... now of course, God could have allowed for a carnivorous state of being before that command, which was made after the creation of man. I don't see a problem with that.
about Venus fly traps and such, there's no reason to think that these were inside the Garden of Eden, and this plant was not given the command of what to eat. (I know... this is so far my weakest point...I still gotta think about this one) But if you believe that the inclusion of the word "green" is a mistake or blooper, how would you go interpreting that passage?
There are just a few small things I'd disagree with in the sermon (which that's fine, right?), but with this point stating that the world is in a fallen state compared to that which was originally created in Genesis, that seems pretty plausible (and I'd never heard that interpretation before).
about whether there was an Adam and Eve, I'll post my ideas at a later time/date about that on the other thread that addresses that specifically. (I read some of the paper from reasons.org that you listed, Meph. I'll write thoughts about that too later when I have time.)
"Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows." - C.S.Lewis, The Great DivorcePost Edited (Violin for God) : 1/9/2005 7:26:14 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
|
Laika
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2003
Total Posts : 2433
| Posted 1/9/2005 9:56 PM (GMT -6) | |
That's neat that you honor your grandpa by using his picture as your avatar, Tom.
I was fortunate to find that picture of you and Iconoclast to use as my avatar.
What a crazy time you guys had with that balloon....
 Post Edited (Laika) : 1/9/2005 9:09:52 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
|
selah
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2001
Total Posts : 1210
| Posted 1/13/2005 1:39 PM (GMT -6) | | http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/002/4.28.html
Tsunamis and Birth Pangs
Let's not bash traditional Christian answers to disaster, only keep them in context.
A Christianity Today editorial | posted 01/13/05 9:00 a.m.
The December 26 tsunami in the Indian Ocean triggered a tidal wave of commentaries on the relationship of God to disasters. Most of them redrew in cartoonish strokes Voltaire's famous response to the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of All Saints' Day, 1755, which claimed an estimated 100,000 lives. That natural disaster destroyed the famous philosopher's optimistic faith in a benevolent though generic Providence. With at least 140,000 souls lost to the 2004 tsunami, it is not surprising to find secularists repeating old challenges to belief in God.
But it is disconcerting to find Christian leaders offering something less than a fully Christian response to the disaster. One case in point: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. In a commentary for The Telegraph, he wrote dismissively of "vacuous words pouring out about the nature of God's power or control, or about the consolations of belief in an afterlife or whatever." He then asserted that "every single random, accidental death … should upset a faith bound up with comfort and ready answers."
Whenever the archbishop mentioned traditional Christian teaching on natural evil, he acknowledged only its defective forms. Otherwise, he devoted himself to desultory comments on the value of human life and the persistence of religious faith in the face of disaster.
Williams wasn't alone. In The Wall Street Journal, Orthodox theologian David Hart described talk of God's inscrutable counsels as "odious" and the suggestion that such disasters serve God's good ends as "blasphemous."
When people take any traditional Christian line of comment by itself, they can paint a devilish picture of God. But each traditional line of thought has some basis in revelation and gives us an important piece of the picture.
Here's a list: God allows evil events in order to bring greater good; God allows evil in order to challenge us to spiritual growth and maturity; God may allow tragedy, but he rewards us with greater blessings in heaven; God is in control of whatever happens, and his ways are inscrutable; God punishes the wicked with disasters. Each of these has an important element of truth,but when isolated from the Bible's big picture, the statements distort our understanding of God.
A Savior, Not a Mechanic
A truly biblical and Christian response to disasters begins with the seriousness of the problem and proceeds to the radical nature of God's solution. Natural evil is a part of the problem to which God's plan of salvation is the answer. Both the contemporary followers of Voltaire and the sub-Christian reflections of some church leaders mistakenly isolate the problem of natural evil from the biblical story of sin and redemption.
Formulated outside its biblical context, the conundrum of evil casts God in the role of a mechanical engineer who is responsible for designing a system and keeping it functional. But the God of the Bible does not merely keep things in working order. If that were his primary role, the infidels and unbelievers would have a point. The dynamic God of the Bible is a savior, not a mechanic. And through the Incarnation, he is a participant in our suffering, not the distant observer posited by the deists. This is certainly one of the key differences between Christian approaches to evil and those of the world's other major religions.
Christian faith knows that both natural disaster and human sin are part of the interim between the Fall that corrupted God's very good creation and the glorious goal toward which history is moving. God is not only the Creator and Sustainer of the world, but he is the Savior, the one who has put it right and continues to put it right. His ultimate goal is the rebirth of the entire creation.
The problem was so great that the Trinity offered a radical solution: the death of the Son of God for the life of the world. The radical nature of the solution speaks loudly of the magnitude of the problem.
Natural disasters remind us that it is not just people but the whole creation that became sick unto death and is being renewed unto life. Paul writes of the whole creation "groaning as in the pains of childbirth" (Rom. 8.22, NLT). The pangs of childbirth can seem intolerable. Yet now in Christ they have their place in the larger picture of birth and renewal. "All creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. … [And] all creation anticipates the day when it will join God's children in glorious freedom from death and decay" (Rom. 8:19, 21).
The discussion of God's control over people and nature today must not be separated from God's victory at the end of history. At the center of this story—at the pivotal point in the narrative—is Jesus, with his arms outstretched. We may not understand or be able to "make sense" of accidental deaths, whether singly or by the tens or hundreds of thousands. We can, however, know Jesus, and in his embrace, we can in turn embrace the suffering world and offer it a sure hope. And it is this costly embrace that Christians the world over have made in recent weeks as they have given generously and worked tirelessly to relieve the suffering in South Asia.
February 2005, Vol. 49, No. 2, Page 28
just readin'
~~~selah
"When we acknowledge that all of life is sacred and that each act is an act of choice and therefore sacred, then life is a sacred dance lived consciously each moment. When we live at this level, we participate in the creation of a better world."
Scout Cloud Lee | | Back to Top | | |
|
Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 1/14/2005 10:24 AM (GMT -6) | | I’d like to post just PART of something I recently shared at the funeral of an infant boy (the child of friends of ours). I don't understand much, but this is where I am:
We Americans just held our third memorial for the events of Sept. 11th. There’s an expression that’s become a familiar part of our language as the result of those events, and that expression is “Ground Zero.” Ground zero is what’s left of a site after the damage and ruin are cleared away. It’s where you stand after you’ve carried away all the debris of a building, all the broken, shattered pieces that once were your work place, your church, your community center, or your home. Now Floridians understand as well as New Yorkers what “Ground Zero” is. It’s the flatness of life stripped bare after some evil, tragedy, or suffering robs you of what once stood there erect and safe.
That’s what ground zero is at least in physical terms. But it’s more than just the mortar, blocks, and bent steel of a destroyed physical building. It’s also the relationships, families, children, loved-ones, dreams, and expectations that make our lives meaningful and satisfying. Ground Zero is what you’re left with after you lose a friend, a marriage partner, or a child, after all the shattered dreams and plans that make life meaningful are unexpectedly carried away by some tragedy. When life strips away some hope or robs us of the joy of parenthood, what’s left? Ground Zero is what’s left. And when you stand empty handed at your own personal ground zero and look around at a world from which every trace of God’s loving protection and goodness seems to have vanished, you ask what’s left? What’s left to rebuild on? And you have to get to ground zero before you can rebuild. You have to know what it is in life that no suffering can remove, no tragedy can shake, no loss can rob you of.
I believe God wants to remind us today that there is one truth, one fact of faith, that stands erect after all the debris and shattered dreams of life are removed and buried. And it is the only thing we ourselves have to cling to and the only thing we have to offer others. And that, friends, is the Cross of Jesus Christ.
The Cross is God’s “Ground Zero.” It’s where God stood after the world stripped him of his son. It’s where God embraced our rebellion, our suffering, our pain, and sin, all the debris of our shattered lives and hopes, and let it all come crashing down around his head. The Cross is God’s Ground Zero. It’s the ground zero of all our ground zeros. It’s the most radical declaration of love and hope there is in the world, in any world. When you remove the ruin of some tragedy, when you bury a child, when all the questions and that torturous “Why?” will not let you sleep at night, what’s left? It’s the unique claim of the Christian faith, the unique hope of the Christian faith, the only offer of the Christian faith, that what is left at Ground Zero after everything else is hauled away is the solitary Cross of Christ where a single sacrificed life became an act which is at one and the same the greatest suffering of evil any human being will ever experience and the greatest act of love the world will ever know.
So what? So what’s that MEAN? What are we supposed to DO with that?
In the Gospel of John, chapter 14, Jesus begins to prepare his disciples for his death and for their being without him. And the disciples get frustrated. “We don’t understand?” they complain. “Where are you going?” And finally Philip says to Jesus, “Look, Jesus, enough of all this obscure reference to the Father. Enough parables! Just show us the Father and that will be all we need.” And Philip was right. That is all he or anyone would need. What Philip didn’t realize was that he had been looking at what the Father is like and living with what the Father is like for the past three years.
Jesus’ answer is crucial for us to understand today. Jesus said to Philip, “I’ve been with you a long time now Philip. Don’t you know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. So why ask me to ‘Show you the Father’? Look at me, Philip. The Father is right here.” I can imagine Jesus taking Philips face on either side with both his hands and pulling his face right up to his own where all Philip could see was the deepness of Jesus’ gaze, and saying, “Here he is! Here’s the Father.” I think that’s what God wants to do in this memorial service for __________. He wants to take our faces, our focus, our attention, and pull them right up to his own face so that our eyes look right into his own and we hear him say the same thing to us: If you’ve seen me you’ve seen the Father. You’ve seen God.”
Jesus is what God is like. Jesus reveals the Father. What Jesus acted like is how God acts. How Jesus loved is how God loves. How Jesus hung on the Cross is how God hangs on the Cross. In the Cross God says, “This is what I’m like. This is how I love. This is how much you can trust me.”
Life is all about learning to trust like that. We have to learn to take these words to heart and let Jesus tell us what sort of God God really is. Because nobody has an uninformed view of God. Something, someone is going to inform your view of God, and your view of God in turn is what ultimately determines how you survive in the world, how you deal with Ground Zero. Jesus tells us that he, his life, his death, his suffering—not our sufferings—are the ultimate authority on what God is like. And that is nowhere more explicitly shouted out to the world than from the Cross.
So what’s the Cross tell us?
FIRST of all the Cross tells us that we don’t live in an ideal world, a fair world, where suffering is evenly and justly distributed. We don’t live in the world God gave us. But we live in one that is broken and fallen, a great big ground zero. That’s even why there is a Cross at all.
SECONDLY, the Cross makes clear the character of God. When suffering strikes us, when some tragedy darkens the landscape and evil we don’t understand robs us of our parents when we are young or of our children when we are older, what are never in doubt are the character and love of God.
But what the Cross doesn’t tell us is how things always work out in a broken and fallen creation even where a God like this is constantly at work. It doesn’t tell us why on one occasion some tragedy is prevented and why on another occasion it is not prevented. That’s the mystery of a world not yet set right. But what there is nothing mysterious about is the character and love of God and that is what we trust in, not in the world being predictable or fair, but in God being faithful and loving.
THIRDLY, the Cross tells us that God takes ultimate responsibility for creating a world in which so much suffering and pain are even possible. He takes our stillborn dreams, our pain, our suffering, and yes, he takes ________, all into himself right there on the Cross.
The British scholar and believer C. S. Lewis was once asked, “What is faith?” And he answered, “Faith is when a person looks around at a world from which every evidence of God’s love and goodness seems to have vanished, and chooses still to believe.” I would only add this morning that for the believer, there is never a world without at least one evidence of God’s love and goodness, and that is the Cross. You’ll never find yourself in a world, a situation, a suffering of heart or body, over which the Cross does not cast its shadow. We suffer in the shadow of God’s suffering.
LASTLY, the Cross points to resurrection and hope, and reunion and celebration, and ultimately to victory over the suffering of the present moment. We will see _________. He’ll grow up. We don’t know how. We’re still on this side of the mystery of resurrection. But even if ________ will miss this part of the journey, the Cross and resurrection assure us that he’ll be there when we finish this part of the journey. The Cross isn’t only about suffering and death. It starts there. But it ends with victorious and resurrected life.
That is what remains at all our ground zeros, and it’s the only thing that does: the Cross and what the Cross means. When everything else is gone, there is still the unconditional love of God taking up our suffering and paying the ultimate price for a fallen and broken world. That’s why, ______ and ______, we are never without hope. Never without comfort. Never ultimately alone. Never ultimately robbed of ________. We mourn, and the pain may seem greater than our ability to bear, but ultimately, Paul reminds us in 1Thess. 4.13, “we don’t mourn the death of loved ones like those who have no hope.” Our mourning is never hopelessness. What’s Paul saying? He’s saying that some people have chosen to remove the Cross from their Ground Zero. They won’t let the Cross demonstrate for them God’s infinite love for them, and once you’ve done that you really are in a world in which every reason for hope have vanished.
TomPost Edited (TGB) : 1/14/2005 9:27:40 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
|
Truth Aficionado
Registered Member
Date Joined Dec 2003
Total Posts : 1544
| Posted 1/14/2005 11:10 AM (GMT -6) | | |
Wonderfully spoken Tom. Thank you for sharing it with us.
I pray God's blessings shower down on you and the child's family,
Mark
Post Edited (sparknheart) : 1/14/2005 1:50:36 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
| 187 posts in this thread.
Viewing Page : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 |
| Forum Information | Currently it is Monday, November 09, 2026 9:28 PM (GMT -6)
There are a total of 97,718 posts in 6,040 threads.
In the last 3 days there were 0 new threads and 0 reply posts. View Active Threads
|
Forum powered by dotNetBB v2.42EC SP3
dotNetBB © 2000-2026 |
|
|